An animated version of the Dragon Curve fractal. However, instead of the usual drawing method using straight lines, I start with a motif of an animated vortex.
If you pick one of the colored vortices and watch it move about the canvas, you'll see it spiral inwards towards some point. Each vortex represents a different sequence of transformations, so each one ends up at a different spot. If this pattern kept going forever, the limit would be the true dragon curve. However, we don't have infinite time or memory, so only the first several iterations are shown.
This was also an experiment in fractal rendering. Here I'm applying the transformations in reverse order from the usual technique. This emphasizes changes at a local level. In this case, each motif splits into two children (somewhat reminiscent of cells undergoing mitosis). The opposite order would emphasize changes at the global level. In this case, you'd see the entire curve fan out into two smaller copies of itself. See this diagram from the same Wikipedia page for what that looks like in comparison.
